Pulpit Freedom Sunday Confronts IRS Rules on Tax-Exempt Groups

In an act of civil disobedience billed as
“Freedom
Sunday,” dozens of American preachers made explicit political endorsements
from the pulpit yesterday. This puts their
churches’ tax exempt status at risk, as the government demands that tax exempt
organizations like churches refrain from electioneering.

This, I suppose, could be seen as a variety of tax resistance.

The preachers have organized and are taking this action in direct
confrontation with the
IRS.
They are recording their sermons and sending this evidence to the agency, and
they have a mutual aid legal fund
(The Alliance Defense Fund).

They’re spinning it as a freedom of speech and freedom of religion issue; the
government, on the other hand, sees its ban as a religion-neutral restriction
on all tax-exempt nonprofits and says that the preachers are free to
say whatever they want to say, but if they also want their churches to be
tax-exempt charities, they have to follow the rules.

Be that as it may, the Freedom Sunday organisers intuit that they’re putting
the government in an uncomfortable place by forcing it to parse sermons and go
after congregations. The government would much rather avoid such
confrontations. So Freedom Sunday is rubbing their noses in it trying to force
them to react in some way, or to concede that they won’t enforce the law
against churches — only one of the churches that participated in the
2008 Freedom Sunday event was investigated by the
IRS and
the agency soon dropped the case.

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